It is considered that in humans noxious organisms such as Escherichia coli become dominant with the advancing years and a number of noxious substances produced by the noxious organism have an adverse influence on the human body. Lactic acid bacteria, which are widely separated from the natural world, generate lactic acid in human intestines to keep the intestinal pH acidic to suppress the growth and multiplication of putrefactive bacteria or pathogenic bacteria such as Escherichia coli in the intestine and have an effect for making environmental improvements to the intestine. In addition of the effect for making environmental improvements to the intestine, lactic acid bacteria have a useful physiological effect or effects such as constipation improvement effect, protection of infection, enhancement of immunological competence, anti-allergic effect, cancer protective effect, and the like. In this situation, in order to promote health by providing the intestine with these useful bacteria called probiotics, the intake of lactic acid bacteria beverages, fermented milk, or pharmaceutical preparations that contain the live organism of these bacteria have been put into practice.
Lactic acid bacteria used in these lactic acid bacteria beverages, fermented milk, or live organism preparations are those suitable for fermentation of milk materials including ones of yoghurt or cheese origin, specifically including the strain of Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Streptococcus thermophiles, Lactococcus lactis, and the like.
On the other hand, as the consumer's taste is diversified in recent years, it has been desired to develop a strain capable of using in probiotics in which raw materials other than milk materials, e.g. vegetable juice or fruit juice could be used as fermentative substrates.
However, when the aforementioned strains so far used in production of lactic acid bacteria beverages were utilized in production with vegetable juices or fruit juices as fermentative substrates, it was unable to achieve high viable cell counts for obtaining the effect as probiotics.
Lactic acid bacteria belonging to Lactobacillus plantarum have so far been known to have a potent fermentative ability for vegetable juices or fruit juices. For example, Lactobacillus plantarum ATCC 14431 is known to achieve the viable cell counts up to 107 CFU/ml or more when a concentrated carrot juice (soluble solid component: 36 mass %; hereinafter simply referred to as %) diluted 6 times is used as a fermentative substrate (Patent Document 1).
In addition, as for a lactic acid bacterium suitable for fermentation of fruit juices in which the organic acid content has been reduced, Lactobacillus plantarum 299v (DSM 9843) is known. Although this Lactobacillus plantarum 299v (DSM 9843) has such disadvantages as strong post-acidification, remarkable functional defect, and generation of carbon dioxide gas, a technology for suppressing such disadvantages by reducing the organic acid content in the fruit juice is also known (Patent Document 2).
These strains belonging to Lactobacillus plantanum, however, do not always afford a high achievable viable cell count concentration to various vegetable juices or fruit juices, and in particular these could not be applied to the fruit juice including grape which is generally considered to be inappropriate as a fermentative substrate for lactic acid bacterium.